How James May accidentally invented Alexa in 2009

A few years back, the media was reeling following the reveal of Alexa, an artificial intelligence that could, without fail, order some lentils to your flat. This kind of technology, which had been on its way for a while, was finally something that would be available for the public. It’d be like having HAL in your house. Or maybe, just maybe – it’d be more like Honda, if only for the innovation of one spaniel-haired muse.

You see, almost ten years ago, James May was writing a column for The Telegraph on all things cars (and other occasional acts of pedantry). One such incidence of this column was about the delivery of car parts. Factories producing motor vehicles all across the world operate on the same “just in time” principle: the parts for every single car that, moments later, rolls off the production line, are delivered at nary a moment’s notice. The factory doesn’t want the inconvenience of storing a vast collection of rims, chassis and window panes, not least because doing so would result in a vast amount of broken glass and/or mortally wounded engineers. So, the storage component is eliminated. A product is delivered immediately before its application.

Interestingly, supermarkets actually do this too. They deliver products right before they get neatly stacked onto a shelf, to make sure their lifetime is extended as far as possible. However, what May notices is that when the food leaves the supermarket and heads back home, it doesn’t receive the same treatment. “No matter how localised the supermarkets seem, there is still, in effect, an even more local one in a corner of my kitchen. Here, food goes off”.

As the old, haggard adage goes: it’s funny because it’s true. May then goes on to imagine a kitchen cupboard that works just like a car factory; food goes in it right before it’s due to be cooked, through a complex delivery system that doesn’t really make any sense. Of course, this was the noughties: David Tennant was still playing Doctor Who, David Cameron hadn’t blown his load yet, and, shockingly, memes were a fringe culture. Of course they didn’t have in-house artificial intelligence; they didn’t even have the indomitable Pepe. And yet, what James May suggests in this column is in effect how modern delivery systems work – not just Alexa or Google Home but Deliveroo, Hello Fresh, Just Eat, whichever. Things are unthinkably convenient, and gigantic supermarkets – the polar opposite of the “just in time” ideology – are being side-lined throughout.

Of course, the whole reason we waste more food nowadays is because things just like supermarkets, fridge freezers and preservatives have distorted our view of how long we can hold onto our groceries for – compared to the olden days of salted meats and veg you had to use straight away. It’s probably for the best that we can now spend less time faffing about, safe in the knowledge that there’s enough food for the week in the fridge. Unfortunately, this change was accompanied by absurd amounts of plastic packaging, hardly biodegradable and a waste of time and money.

So yes, James, I’d like a cupboard that puts food in it whenever I’d like. But maybe they needn't double bag the cucumber.